"Bauernschläue" - the cunning of the peasants
A brief historical investigation as to why modern society has a love/hate relationship with farming
The past two weeks have seen increasing protests by farmers in Europe. After last year's Dutch farmers taking to blocking roads with their tractors, now it has been the turn of first the German farmers (news covered very well by Eugyppius here on Substack),
and then even more so, because rather well-practiced, the French farmers. Needless to say this is an embarrassment for the mainstream media, who like the BBC here in the UK are trying their utmost to just ignore it. This wilful neglect of reportage is not just the by now usual sweeping under the carpet of inconvenient events and/or facts. It also points to a deeper, older, historically-grounded aversion of the urban sophisticate towards the rural rustic who is in fact not as stupid as the cliche of rusticity makes out. This is the concept of "Bauernschläue".
"Bauernschläue" is one of those wonderfully expressive German compound nouns, an amalgam of "Bauer" = farmer, peasant + "Schläue" = slyness, cunning, cleverness. To demonstrate "Schläue" is a little devious. It means more than just being clever or smart in the sense of being intelligent. It is the smart, clever, even calculating behaviour of the simple folk, and the ability of such people to take an unorthodox, smart and clever path, or rather to keep their advantage. Therefore, if you are "schlau" (the adjective), then your cleverness is slightly tainted with illegitimacy: a fox robbing chickens is "schlau" by outwitting the fences of the farmer. And ironically that same farmer is "schlau" by outwitting the highly-educated, credentialled, solipsistically befuddled urbanite elite.
An anecdote I heard in the UK in the late 1980s (when Britain was still in the EU, for those of short historical memory) concerned a particular well-travelled flock of sheep, which would regularly make the crossing of the Irish Sea between Wales and Ireland, back and forth, for this same flock to be counted towards both the Irish and the Welsh farmers' agrarian EU-subsidies. This is Bauernschläue at its best: the simple, 'stupid' farmers outwitting the pen-pushing bureaucrats.
The animal fable of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, originally by none other than the 'inventor' of the fable himself, Aesop, is an offshoot of such stereotypes, and gives us some idea as to how ancient this idea of the uneducated but clever person getting the upper over the educated but stupid one might be. (For those who need reminding of the fairy tales from their childhood, in the story the Town Mouse brags to his visiting cousin the Country Mouse about all the fancy food he can eat and the life of luxury he leads, until they are disturbed by a cat pouncing upon them, at which the mice have to beat a hasty retreat to the safety but simplicity of their mouse-hole; the moral being that the Country Mouse has the better, because more secure, life, albeit simpler.) Pitting the respective merits of country life against urban life are therefore not new ideas.
But back to the etymology of this agrarian deviousness. The "schlau" element of the farmer's clever "Bauernschläue" contains some telling insights into the perception of this particular kind of cleverness as something illicit and dubious. From the wiktionary entry on "schlau":
Borrowed from Middle Low German slû, whence probably also Dutch sluw. Further origin uncertain. Probably from a Proto-Germanic *slūhaz (“sneaking, creeping”), perhaps ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)leuǵ (“to crawl, slide”), if the original sense referred to sneaking and sliding. Related with Dutch sluiken (“to creep, smuggle, act clandestinely”). In spite of the near-identity in meaning and form, English sly is in all likelihood not related.
Let's see how language translates into real-life perceptions. The German-language Wikipedia entry for "Bauernschläue" is particularly elucidating here. According to the website's discussion of the term, rural people with little formal education are actually quite capable of combining ruse, reticence and far-reaching planning, especially when it comes to gaining the upper hand over meddling officials and authority figures. Although the term "Bauernschläue" can sometimes - rarely - be used to highlight that education and intelligence are not invariably connected, in the main the term is used as a negative in German. In typical Germanic fashion of over-thinking and hyperphilosophising, the Wikipedia article continues by drawing attention to a sociological distinction between the rural concept of 'community' ("Gemeinschaft") and the urban notion of 'society' ("Gesellschaft"). This distinction was theorised by the founder of German academic sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), whose magnum opus Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) put forth the idea that there are two basically divergent forms for the organisation of human life: community and society. According to Tönnies, communities are organically grown systems, while societies are artificial creations. The rural, bottom-upward community stands in contrast to the metropolitan top-down imposition. So as not to risk further digression, I will park these theories here, suffice it to point out that this late-nineteenth century analysis is just the culmination of a long historical thread running through the conflict between rural and urban relationships.
Ever since the ancient Romans gave us the original pagans, the urban elite have looked down on the rural underclass. The English word 'pagan' derives from a Latin administrative term "pagus" which meant a country district, and which in its extended meaning then became Latin "paganus" meaning the inhabitant of such a district, hence a villager and furthermore a country-dweller, a rustic. To be a pagan by the fourth century AD meant to be a clumsy rural clod, in contrast with the mainly urban Christianised social elite.
Similarly, the Latin rusticus who was originally an inhabitant of the rus, the countryside, became synonymous with the unpolished, uncouth, rough object, or in the case of a person, someone lacking in social graces or polished manners. Rus the countryside was only a positive it it was clean, manicured, sanitised, and importantly unproductive countryside: rus in urbe, the country in the city, is a Latin saying by the poet Martial (c.40-c.104) that refers to a pleasurable garden located in the city, and which epitomises the imitation of the real thing in a sterile but safe environment. By the 18th century, English landowners had taken this idea to probably its extreme. The aesthetically pleasing, beautiful landscape parks and gardens created by the likes of the famous 'Capability' Brown and Humphrey Repton were basically glorified eye-candy for the super-rich of the time, since they looked good but delivered nothing (or at least very little) in terms of agricultural produce. A couple of ornamental cattle grazing in the perfectly framed Claudian viewpoint of that classical landscape garden did not make for a sustainable food supply for the peasants that created this pleasure ground, nor did the costumed frolics of the likes of Madame Pompadour as a shepherdess or Marie Antoinette playing at dairy-maid at the Hameau de la Reine make for productive agriculture. Let's bring this forward to the 21st century: the EU-proposed 4% reduction in cultivated land will create wonderfully rewilded, picturesque, ecohabitat-friendly landscapes that are ultimately just as decorative but unproductive as their 18th-century predecessors - a luxury add-on for those who have enough to eat.
And the farmers and former peasants of times gone by? Once upon a time, in that pre-modern world generally considered to have existed up until the Industrial Revolution, the majority of people in Europe worked the land. Whether as owners of tracts large or small, or peasants or landless workers, rural people working on and with the land far outnumbered those in cities, who relied to a large extent on the import of foods from their rural surroundings. In the Middle Ages it is estimated that almost 85 to 90 percent of the population of Europe was directly involved with agricultural production, whether for foodstuffs or derivative products like wood or leather. The remaining 10 to 15 percent of the population formed the clergy, merchants, university scholars and other such 'unproductive' elements. The medieval nobility cut across both unproductive class, in their role as political, secular rulers, and agrarian class, in their role as landowners and hence producers. One cannot therefore simply apply modern notions of hierarchical classes (lower, middle, upper).
Perhaps the medieval model of society actually explains the situation best. This is the image of the 'body politic', where society is literally imagined as being like a human body. This anatomical image was influential by the later Middle Ages and beyond (think Hobbes' Leviathan), and had best been expressed by John of Salisbury (c.1115-1180). John described human society as being ruled by a prince (his word for a ruler of any kind) like the head rules the human body; next came what he called the senate, that is the prince's/king's counsellors and advisors (we might say the career politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats), who are like the heart of the body; the senses of sight, hearing and so on correspond to the judiciary who act in the prince's name (we might think of police, security agencies and law-enforcement here); the body's organs of consumption, the stomach and intestines, are quite aptly equated with the financial instruments of the state, while the two hands are respectively tax-collector and the soldier; and lastly, the feet are the artisans and peasants "who erect, sustain and move forward the mass of the whole body". Farmers and peasants, food-producers, in modern parlance the so-called 'working-class' generally, are the base on which all of society rests to function properly. Cut away this base, and the whole edifice crumbles. As John of Salisbury pointed out, the body politic needs to be maintained in a healthy state by being kept in harmonious balance between the constituent parts, but of these, the feet are the most important. Cut off the feet, and the entire body becomes disabled, crippled, malfunctioning. John of Salisbury: "Remove from the fittest body the aid of the feet; it does not proceed under its own power, but either crawls shamefully, uselessly and offensively on its hands or else is moved with the assistance of brute animals". This disability metaphor is ignored by modern critics at their peril. If there is only one thing the current farmers' protests are making reality-removed urbanites painfully aware of, it is that someone has to feed them.
This someone is the humble, simple, often downtrodden but ultimately resilient and resourceful farmer. The peasants of old were also aware of this, which is probably why they did revolt, quite frequently in fact throughout the Middle Ages. But the powers that be were quick to nip in the bud any such self-liberation attempts, for precisely the reason that peasants and farmers were too important to be left to their own devices, let alone to gain a position of power. When farmers were lauded, after the Industrial Revolution had shrunk their numbers and they were no longer a mass to be reckoned with, such praise often had a taint of the reactionary, we would now say right-wing. This is a particular problem in Germany, whose brown past (the brown Nazi shirts providing the colour scheme, same as the better-known red for left-wing) forged an unfortunate metaphorical linkage between the brown of a Nazi ideology and the brown of the farmers' soils: the idea of Blut und Boden, 'blood and soil'. Because of this former Nazi idealisation of rural life and rural inhabitants, in contrast to what the Nazis saw as a decadent urbanity, the current German farmers' protests are seen as suspiciously right-wing by the metropolitan laptop classes. That favourite bogeyman of German politics, the 'far-right' or 'extreme right' is tediously recycled and trotted out at such moments.
And here we are back to the contemporary moment. As long as the supermarket shelves remain full, or in the case of the chattering classes as long as that dear little farmers' market carries on selling artisan bread, the farmer and his produce will be taken for granted. But each farmer less is a loaf of bread less produced, that requires importation from further afield or reduction in consumption at home. Europe is (still just about) too affluent to make starvation a reality, but even without full-on famine there will be shortages if current policies continue. Even the BBC had to, buried in the midst of one of their so-called news reports, allude to such possibilities:
As part of the European Union's plans to meet climate commitments, it has introduced new rules requiring farmers to leave 4% of their land unused, or fallow.[French farmer] Coppé reckons that means he's unable to plant wheat on the equivalent of 16 football fields, which translates into "100 tonnes of grain, which is the equivalent of 80 tonnes of flour, which makes 300,000 baguettes. And this is just from my small farm - 300,000 baguettes…. A large amount of unmade goods that would, potentially, be imported into the EU. It's not sustainable. We don't follow the logic," Coppé declared.
And that is why I am all in support of farmers rediscovering their traditional Bauernschläue.
[I am still trying to put together a much longer, in-depth piece with my thoughts on 'rootedness' and materiality in the past versus the modern peripatetic, rootless life-style of the laptop classes, but the Europe-wide growing farmers' protests have made me detach a chunk of that planned piece, to sit here as a stand-alone essay. The two pieces will be connected, however, and I hope can be read in tandem (when I finally finish the longer one).]
'there are two basically divergent forms for the organisation of human life: community and society. According to Tönnies, communities are organically grown systems, while societies are artificial creations.'
A very intriguing observation, which definitely merits further thought.
Re "Bauernschläue", I know it's probably not what you had in mind, but I kept thinking about Miss Marple in her tiny village, showing up the big-city professionals 😜